Story #3

Memory

In my brain there is a lack of something. The doctors call it thiamine and my mom says it’s the reason I have this disease called Korsakoff’s syndrome. She says it causes me to forget things. But I make up for what I forget. I once went to the aquarium and the octopus that floated by staring at me. It waved at me from in the tank with one of its giant tentacles and I waved back. I think it might have even winked back at me, but my mom told me I should stop making things up, and I will but I’m not. It did wink at me. I’m sure it did.

My friends and I went over to Thomas’ house a couple weeks ago, we were just playing around with the storm trooper action figures that just been released in stores. I had the coolest one out of all of them but I shared with the others. My mom always says that sharing is a good thing to do. While we were playing with the storm troopers, Thomas’ older brother came home from his school and showed us this trick where he could make an ace of diamonds turn into an ace of spades, all he had to do was flick the cards. It really happened, and when I came home to tell my mom and dad, my mom told me that it didn’t happen and I should stop making things up. Maybe I was making it up…

Another time, my mom had taken me to the park so she could talk with some of her adult friends and she told me to go play in the grass. I remember that day clearly. I had been walking around doing nothing in particular, these talks Mom had were usually really long, so I thought I’d try to keep myself busy. I tried to climb a couple trees but I got bored of that and I ended up walking a big loop around the park and found a twenty dollar bill hidden in the grass. When I showed my mom she told me not to make things up and that stealing was never okay. I had to give her the money and she said she would turn it in or something.

Yesterday, Thomas and I walked to my house after lunch because we didn’t feel like going to our afternoon math class. Multiplication tables and numbers weren’t our favorite so we figured we could maybe sneak home to my house and play some more with our action figures like we did a couple times before. When we got to my house, I used the spare key that we hid under the welcome mat by our front door. When we walked in, the house smelled almost like how Dad did before he would head off to work, but the smell was a little different. Usually our house is empty during the day but today, Mom’s work shoes and large pair of dark leather shoes waiting by the front door, they didn’t look like Dad’s because he had black ones and these were a tan brown color. We saw this other man with my mom, on the couch in the living room. It looked like something we were learning about in our health class. Mom says I should stop making things up.